FEATURE


TRAIN LEADERS, TRANSFORM CARE


Pauline Vuyelwa Muswere-Enagbonma, Co-founder and Group Chief Executive of the Jessamy Care Group, explains why high- quality training and fair, inclusive, values-led education for care leaders is essential.


As social care leaders, we talk a great deal about recruitment, regulation and resilience. We talk less often about the quiet engine that sits beneath all three: the quality, fairness and values behind how we educate, train and develop the people who lead our services.


The regulatory framework is already clear. Under Regulation 18 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008, providers must ensure that staff are suitably qualified, competent and supported through training, supervision and ongoing professional development. This applies as much to leaders as it does to frontline staff. A service cannot be genuinely ‘well-led’ if its leadership has been leſt to learn by trial and error, with patchy access to structured development and reflective education.


High-quality, values-led leadership training does three essential things.


First, it anchors decision-making in ethics as well as in compliance. Courses that integrate the duty of candour, safeguarding, human rights and equality legislation with real-world case studies help leaders translate regulation into day-to-day behaviours, how we respond when something goes wrong, how we listen when families are distressed, how we hold ourselves to account when no one is watching. In my own practice, I have seen services transform their culture simply because managers were given safe, skilled spaces to examine their own assumptions and to practise truly transparent leadership.


Third, values-led education and training protects people who draw on care and support. The evidence is consistent, a well- skilled, well-supported workforce is directly linked to safer, higher-quality care and better outcomes. When leaders are trained to think systemically, understanding finance, workforce planning, digital solutions and regulation together, they are more likely to make decisions that are sustainable for the organisation and humane for the individual. That balance matters in a sector under financial pressure, where training budgets can be the first line to be cut.


“Too often, access to leadership education in social care has depended


on geography, employer resource or who happens to notice your potential.”


Second, it levels the playing field. Too oſten, access to leadership education in social care has depended on geography, employer resource or who happens to notice your potential. That is neither fair nor sustainable. If we are serious about inclusion, then our training pipelines must be accessible to aspiring leaders from diverse backgrounds, including internationally recruited staff, care workers progressing from the frontline, and those whose lived experience of disability, mental health or caring gives them a different lens on risk, dignity and choice. Fair, transparent criteria for development opportunities are not a ‘nice-to-have’; they are part of our equity duty.


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For me, the question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in leadership development; it is whether we can afford not to. A care leader who has never been invited to interrogate their own bias, to understand trauma-informed practice, or to lead through digital transformation will struggle to meet the expectations now placed on the sector.


Looking ahead, I believe the future belongs to organisations that treat education for leaders not as a one-off course, but as a continuous, values-anchored journey, blending accredited programmes, coaching, reflective spaces, lived-experience input and rigorous CPD. This integrated approach builds both confidence and accountability in those who hold responsibility for others. When we pair that with a clear, lived set of organisational values, we create leaders who can hold complexity with courage and compassion.


High-quality, fair and inclusive training for care leaders is not a luxury. It is the foundation upon which safe, kind and future- ready care is built. If we want tomorrow’s care to look different from yesterday’s, we must be prepared to educate our leaders differently and to do so in a way that honours both regulation and the humanity at the heart of our work.


www.jessamyhomecare.co.uk www.tomorrowscare.co.uk


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